Professional
Revolutionary: The Life of Saul Wellman

“I want things to change where the playing field is leveled, where equality emerges as a reality...
where the horrible things about inequities are eliminated.” Those few words convey the life that
Saul Wellman, now 89 years old, has tried to live since he was a teenager. While
Professional Revolutionary tells the compelling story of Wellman’s 75 years of political activism, his life’s
significance reaches beyond his specific causes to his spirit and core beliefs. The deepest goal of
this film is to communicate one man’s example of political commitment: that living
passionately in the wider world does not detract from personal goals, that one must change in
order to stay the same, that taking risks makes one a fuller person, and that living a political life
without conventional rewards can be richly satisfying.

Near the beginning of
Professional Revolutionary, a time-worn but vital and articulate Saul
Wellman recalls that “at the age of 16, believe it or not, I decided I was going to become a
professional revolutionary. And you know what happened? I became a professional
revolutionary, for the rest of my life.” Saul Wellman, a political activist through much of the
twentieth century, is still at it in the twenty-first. Thus his personal story is also the story of
some of America’s most volatile and dramatic decades.

The film begins and concludes with Wellman, in a wheelchair, preparing to participate in
a demonstration in April, 2003. As the film ends, he asserts that “the worst thing is passivity.”
The goal is “to react to your problems today – and to react to your problems today doesn’t mean
you have to carry a red banner and yell revolution and so on and so forth. Do something about
it.” This is the main theme of Wellman’s life and the film, reflecting a commitment so powerful
that his whole life has been immersed in the main causes and issues of his times.

Through the approach of placing the man in his time, the film portrays one of the most
remarkable and stirring, though unheralded, figures of the past three-quarters of a century.
Wellman’s riveting story incorporates three parts: his youth, and participation in both the
Spanish Civil War and World War II; his Detroit adventures as a Communist Party functionary
and as a union activist; and his life with the New Left.

Part one begins with his youth in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg section, a hotbed of Jewish
radicalism where he plunged into the ferment around him during the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Wellman lived the period’s highs and lows, its dangers and dramas, its greatest hopes and worst
disasters. He began his political career as a labor organizer, and then volunteered to fight for the
Republic in the Spanish Civil War. Wounded, he returned home. But soon after, the thirty-year
old father of two children volunteered as a paratrooper in the Second World War, where he was
seriously wounded, captured, and escaped from the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge.

The second part opens with Wellman, with his wife and children, moving to Detroit – in
the midst of the city’s major change from war-time boom to post-war unemployment. He
worked as a Communist leader in the shadow of the industrial behemoth, the Ford Rouge plant,
and in 1949 became head of the Michigan Communist Party. Soon after, the anti-Communist
witch hunts of the McCarthy period forced Wellman to live underground, separating him from
his children for nearly two years. Increasingly apparent is both the radical commitment and the
toughness of those who assumed the mantle of revolutionaries between the 1930s and 1950s.
But also evident is the cost to Wellman’s children, of their sacrifices and abandonment in having
a father who admits that “politics always came first.”

The cocky revolutionary was arrested as one of the “Detroit Six” in 1952 under the
federal anti-Communist Smith Act, and became the star defendant in Michigan’s most
sensational political trial. In the film, the U.S. prosecuting attorney for the first time gives his
side of the story, concluding by apologizing to Wellman for the frenzy of the time and resulting
unfair trial and verdict. Wellman had served only six months of his five-year sentence in Milan
Prison when the application of Smith Act provisions was reinterpreted in a ruling of the U.S.
Supreme Court in 1958.

The year became a turning point in his life. With his conviction set aside and in the wake
of Khrushchev’s devastating revelations of Stalin’s atrocities and reign of terror, Wellman
concluded that the Communist Party had become irrelevant in the modern world and, resigning
from the party, began to restructure and rebuild his life. Consequently, in order to earn a living,
at age forty-three Wellman became an apprentice in a printing firm. After overcoming
considerable bias because of his Communist background, he was elected an officer of the
lithographer’s union and in 1970 was a leader of its first major strike.

Part three begins with Wellman retiring as a printer and once again laboring to become
relevant in a changing world. Actively engaging in the New Left’s anti-war and civil-rights
movements reaffirmed his self-definition as a professional revolutionary. And these associations
drew him back into an active role in Detroit politics. But most impressive and even touching
about his place in the social and political world of these times was his newfound relevance as a
mentor and father-figure to over one-hundred young activists of the New Left with whom he met
individually and in groups, along with lecturing widely and interacting with younger people
around the world. Wellman thus in his own time became – and remains – an advisor, a model,
and an inspiration, creating once again a new activism for himself as a living bridge between an
older political world and a new one.

Saul Wellman changed with the times – one can actually observe the young rebel
becoming a wiser and calmer activist – while maintaining his political values and integrity.
What the film achieves is a remarkably complex portrayal of one man’s struggle and sacrifice for
his political beliefs. As the film ends at a protest against the 2003 war in Iraq, Wellman
reaffirms the importance of action – no matter what. For even aging and half-blind, Saul
Wellman invites the most diverse groups of people to see themselves in a wider world, share the
common condition, and act to improve it.

Epilogue: Wellman’s struggle and sacrifice have finally been recognized and applauded in the
most unexpected ways. This man who was once tried for treason and sedition in the United
States in 1996 was made an honorary citizen by the Spanish government in a stirring ceremony
in Madrid. And he has been honored for his contributions to the working class and young
people in testimonials by both the Michigan Legislature, and the Detroit City Council.